The Year That Killed Received Pronunciation (RP) 

Sign up for a 14-day free trial and enjoy all the amazing features MyHeritage has to offer bit.ly/DrGeoffLindseyMH

As a Canadian raised on Monty Python, I thought making fun of the upper class had ALWAYS been been a part of British identity. Fascinating.

I left the UK in 76 for the USA. When I saw the movie Attack the Block and it's young Londoners I realized that the accent I had grown up with was becoming a fossil.

Alternative title: that was the accent that was.

I started learning English in the Soviet Union at the very end of 80s. We were supposed to learn RP from these squiggles, and maybe some old and well worn reel to reel tapes that were played in class once or twice. We also learned that there's 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, and other such nonsense. We were tested on that, apparently this was important knowledge. I think the textbooks may have been a little out of date. We also learned German from pre-war era textbooks. It's absurd remembering how we were taught in comparison with the language spoken today. I suspect the most up-to-date language curriculum must have been Latin.

As an American, those comedy sketches would have completely baffled me if you had not told me that they were making fun of the accent.

"This whirlwind of social change had phonetic consequences" is the greatest line ever uttered in a history documentary.

A smaller but equally rapid change took place in Sweden at around the same time. In the late 1960s, over the course of just a couple of years, the entire population went from addressing other people using formal titles, last names or "polite" pronouns, to using the informal second-person singular "du" (cognate with "thou", of course) throughout all levels of society. It hugely simplified interactions with people you before the change wouldn't have been on a first-name basis with. Instead of having to figure out what title to use, or resorting to convoluted and bizarre indirect sentence structures, everyone could just use one simple word. It made social interactions much less stressful and it helped lessen the gap between social classes.

In the late 1970's we had a next door neighbor, the Bakers. He was American ands managed the local hardware store. His wife was English, spoke with a very pompous and very posh RP accent. I don't know how posh she was in England, but while he was very down to earth and quite friendly, she gave the impression that she considered herself well above those in her social circle and according to my parents, not very popular. I'm not sure she was entirely happy being married to a man who ran a shop, but he provided for his family well enough. The daughter was my age and we even dated a bit in high school. The house we lived in was part of a brand new development, and my family was the first to move into the street. The yards were all undone, and my dad delighted in having a yard to design. He worked as a welder and he built a heavy duty utility trailer and he let my sister (6) and me (8) choose the color. It was 1978 and we picked the brightest, most obnoxious color we could find. A super bright, day glow green. Dad kept the trailer next to the house and it lit up everything in green. We were all extremely delighted when the English neighbor complained that the trailer "Offended the finer senses." She was right, and that was the point. When dad got his yard installed he sold the trailer to a guy with a landscaping business. I happened to see him, he still had the trailer after owning it for 20 years. I walked up to the guy and asked him about it. I asked if he had it pained that color, or had repainted that color. He said, "No. The man I bought the trailer from said his kids chose the color. I purchased it because I had an accident with another driver who said he did not see the old trailer." I smiled and said, "Well, I'm glad my sister and I picked a good color no one would miss even 20 years later." We laughed and he said no one ever failed to see the trailer. It still offended the finer senses.

This reminded me of something I heard from a retired FBI agent who joined the FBI around 1940. He was talking about the rules J. Edgar Hoover had established. One was that all employees had to speak with something close to what he thought of as an American mid-western accent (Which was close to what you heard in the American Hollywood movies of the time.). This was to ensure accurate communications. Any applicant that had a strong regional accent would be rejected.

At the same time The Beatles were making a working class Liverpool accent more acceptable in Britain, their producer, George Martin, was using an affected upper class British accent to make himself more acceptable in business and social circles. Things were definitely changing.

With regard to the change of social perceptions of accents, something I stumbled upon recently was that you can find recordings of election results programmes from different years on RU-vid. This was fascinating to me as you can see how the speech of the presenters change over time. They always inherently tend towards formal and "posh" speech as heavyweight political TV commentators, and the event itself is one of the most formal and "serious" on TV, so it's hardly a snapshot of normal speech, and the speech on such programmes will always appear rather stuffy and formal, even slightly archaic at the time of broadcast, but it's a constant setting that you can compare throughout the years. (And you hear the contrast of the "posh, presentery" with regional accents from candidates and pundits in any single programme) So I was looking through some of these, fascinated at hearing the historic accents, when I stumbled into the 1997 coverage, when I was a couple of years too young to vote, but definitely remember watching it all at the time. (I very dimly recall 1992, but 1997 was really my "first" election as an observer) And I was struck by how almost comically archaic some of the accents sounded! Yet, I never had this sense at the time. It would have sounded a bit stuffy, sure, but not amusingly alien. A real eye-opener on how much my own perceptions must have changed with the changing of the language!

Perhaps one lesson is that if you want to kill off some form of speech, you should write a book declaring that it is the new standard!

A lovely example of the rise in acceptance of regional accents can be heard in the BBC documentary about the climbing of The Old Man of Hoy in the 1980s. In it, you can hear clips from the earlier televised climb in the 1960s. Joe Brown, a working class mancunian who took part in both climbs, can be heard veering from a strangulated RP in the older documentary to a more relaxed and natural mode of speech in the newer programme.

The Advanced RP of the UK was mirrored by a similar trend in American accents at prestigious, private schools. (This was still the era of the mid-Atlantic accent in Hollywood). Look to the character of Gloria Upson in the 1958 movie Auntie Mame. Her affected accent has many of the same vowel sounds as Advanced RP. Which are most easily made by jutting it your jaw and locking it in place.

"As long as we know what we're talking about, we could call the accent Kevin" had me on the floor

I’m an American and always loved hearing RP in old movies. As a child I liked movies with Ronald Colman and David Niven, who made English sound beautiful.

We have our own version of RP in Northern Ireland which I've heard called a "newsreader" or "UTV" (Ulster Television) accent which is essentially a particularly posh, almost anglophone version of a Belfast accent. The name comes from the fact that it is usually the kind of accent used by people on the news or TV in general over here that is considered very put on and inauthentic. A lot of celebrities from here go a bit newsreader to our ears when they get famous in Britain or America, probably done so in case their real way of speaking might be hard to understand to other English speakers.

Worth mentioning the interview with the Beatles on the eve of their appearance at the 1963 royal variety show. The interviewer is asking them about whether they'll modify their behaviour/appearance/speech given that they'll be appearing before the Queen Mother. He then mentions that Tory MP Ted Heath (who epitomised an 'affected' RP accent) had said that he "couldn't distinguish the Beatles' accents", and Lennon answers with a mock RP accent and the jibe that he "won't vote for Ted".

I'm pretty sure the 60s was when most people in Norway stopped putting on a "standard accent" (i.e. bokmål with a western Oslo accent, or Nynorsk with any big city accent) when speaking in more formal settings and started using their regular accent/dialect in all settings. Somewhat ironically in the 70s (or so) a lot of people in the labour movement who naturally spoke a western Oslo accent began putting on a fake eastern Oslo working class accent to avoid sounding too posh. The 60s/70s is also (like in Sweden) the time we more or less completely stopped using the traditional polite address of using last names and titles and the second person plural "De" to refer to people politely to ising the second person singular "du" and first names. By the 1990s we barely even remember to address the royals in polite forms when speaking to them in person. One journalist famously kept saying "du" (informal "you") rather than "deres kongelige høyhet" ("your royal highness") to the crown prince in a series of interviews filmed over several days because it's now so unnatural for us not to be informal with everyone. And when we speak about the royals we fairly regularly refer to them only by their first name without any titles; and the crown prince which properly is "kronprinsen" we very often refer to as the silly shortened form "krompen".

As a non-native english speaker (and having never lived in a english speaking country) I don't relate british dialects/sosiolects to class as brits do. But I must say that what you describe as old fashioned RP (like the queen spoke) is much easier to understand and more pleasant to listen to than most speakers today. Thats the impression of most people I know.

I'm a New England native having morning coffee and seeing what random videos are popping up on my feed. I had little interest in this topic yet you captured my full attention throughout. Oh, if only more university professors here had your excellent communication skill! Thank you.

I finally understand where Dr Frankenfurter's accent in Rocky Horror Picture Show comes from!!

This is fascinating. So glad you posted this.

Lovely work on the closing credits too!

oh my god, i love that credits sequence. i can't wait for the follow-up to this video

Truly outstanding presentation. Seriously well done! You are a gifted communicator and educator.

What a fascinating and well reasoned presentation. As a user of the English language (I'm a poet and playwright) who lived through this era I was aware of this shift but have never heard it analysed and explained so clearly. Thank you.

Cracking delve into the joys of the British obsession with class, and its linguistic identifiers. Loved the historical and cultural elements to this vid, Geoff. It would be good to throw in a few more like this for other elements of language in the future, do'n cha know. Thank you.

A friend of mine in Germany (whose teacher must've studied RP) approacher her teachier about translating the lyrics to the Beathles' "Yesterday". At which point he corrected her in that it was pronounced "YestaDEE". As in "Yesterday, all my troubles were so far awee..."

Fascinating video, as always

What an excellent and fascinating video! Thank you dr Lindsey for continously sharing your expertise here on YT. Special kudos for the credits sequence. A video on why and how phonetic symbols became fossilised would be very interesting as well!

Fascinating as always. The story of advanced RP reminds me in some ways of the Dublin 4 accent in Ireland, which became popular among young elites in the 1970s-80s, before quickly becoming so ridiculed to the point where it became largely neutered only 20 or 30 years later. Nonetheless, its legacy as the stereotypical 'posh' Dublin accent carries on to this day. Geoff, I would love to see a video on this topic, if it is something that interests you! From Wikipedia: "New Dublin English largely evolved out of an even more innovative variety, Dublin 4 English, which originated around the 1970s or 1980s from middle- or higher-class speakers in South Dublin before spreading outwards. Also known as "D4" or "DART speak" because of local associations, or, mockingly, "Dortspeak", this dialect rejected traditional, conservative, and working-class notions of Irishness, with its speakers instead regarding themselves as more trendy and sophisticated. However, particular aspects of the D4 accent became quickly noticed and ridiculed as sounding affected or elitist by the 1990s, causing its defining features to fall out of fashion by the 1990s."

Hi Geoff, I found this particularly priceless. RP being not that geographically geared is, I think, a direct product of the British class system. For a foreign learner like me, the video provides invaluable social context. Thank you.

I think that I finally understand Richard E. Grant's accent fully. -- his teachers were in Africa while all of those social changes were occurring. I guess this applies to Freddie Mercury as well, but I'm more familiar with his singing voice than his speaking voice. Edit: as I re-read this comment I realize I haven't offered any context. I have seen several sources remarking that the people who speak the best, most perfect English (i.e., with the "right" accent) are those who were raised in Africa or India or other, now former colonies. Two famous examples are Grant, who was born in Swaziland, Freddie Mercury in Zanzibar. Very interesting and all that, but presumably because I am American, I wondered first if this was actually true and second why that would be the case. Still not sure if this is really a "tell," but your video definitely explains why this could occur. Thanks!

Reckon this is your best video so far mate, well done. The history section was very good and shows how all of these things are interconnected and you can't just look at a topic like this in a vacuum. Would love to hear more examples of phonetics as influenced by a wider cultural shift

I love this channel!!! Every video a gem!

18:05 "...it became possible to sound too posh for your own good". The first thought that popped into my head was that twit (tamest word I could employ) Rees-Mogg.

I say, what a simply exquisite moving picture.

BRAVO! Stunningly well done!

Dear Dr. Lindsey. I've just cime across this video and found it fascinating. As a language student of the late 1980s-early 1990s, the tremendous preoccupation with RP has always fascinated me, particularly as a fan of George Bernard Shaw and the plan to invent an acceptable and inoffensive accent for the BBC. I hope you realize that your video would have greatly upset some of the lesser but more popularized authorities on linguistics, phonetics ad, particularly, accents of my generation. The real experts would, of course, have recognized the inevitable futility of an imposed form of speech as a long-term project. Thanks for this. You've made my day!

As an American who lived in England when I was younger, I found it interesting that you could tell a lot more about someone's socioeconomic class in England from their speech than you could in the United States.

This change in prestige is commented upon in the opening minutes of the first ever Doctor Who episode 'An Unearthly Child' originally broadcast on 23 November 1963. (LIVELY MUSIC PLAYING ON RADIO) Barbara: Susan. Susan: Oh, I'm sorry, Miss Wright. I didn't hear you coming in. Aren't they fabulous? Barbara: Who? Susan: It's John Smith and the Common Men. They've gone from 19 to 2. Barbara: Oh. Ian: John Smith is the stage name of the honourable Aubrey Waites. He started his career as Chris Waites and the Carollers, didn't he, Susan? Susan: You are surprising, Mr Chesterton. I wouldn't expect you to know things like that. Ian: I have an enquiring mind. And a very sensitive ear.

I still have a copy of the Oxford Dictionary (the abridged or the shorter?) my parents gave me when I left Malaysia to go to the US to study. I recognized the Gimson symbols; the dictionary used it to describe pronunciation. And I also distinctly remember being confused when I encountered the IPA years later, trying to correlate it with the Gimson symbols. It was not something I dwelt on but this video has finally cleared it up for me. Many thanks. I really enjoyed the video.

Very informative. Interesting and concise

Traditional RP- The Goons Advanced RP - Monty Python Southern English - Shawn of the Dead

I have long been an ardent admirer of Cary Grant and would love to see how he ended up coming up with his iconic and unique accent - where all the parts of it came from and its construction. Hope this is something that would interest you. Thanks for your continually engaging content. Best wishes from the Pacific NW.

That’s brilliantly put! Thank you, this actually clarifies some matters for me, given I wasn’t around in 1960s and I’m not native.

I can't believe you missed out on the title "RIP RP" Thanks for all the information though, that was fascinating!

Reverse Polish was killed after the HP calculator.

This is insightful, but I would say the demise of RP shouldn't be too overexaggerated. I grew up in a middle class family in North Yorkshire and went to a private 'prep' school in the late 70s to early 80s and we all spoke 'RP' more or less then (I remember one teacher there in particular, who had a very old-fashioned upper class, drawling kind of speech - he looked and sounded rather like Churchill). Apparently I started off with a slight Yorkshire accent from my state nursery school but my first teacher at the prep school soon told me the 'right' way to speak, with long 'ah' sounds in bath and path etc. I went to a state comprehensive after that where more people (but not everyone) had Yorkshire accents. But then I went to a (more academic, but still 'state') grammar school, where I remember an English teacher, helping me prepare for a debating competition, telling me my pronunciation of bury (with an 'uh' sound) was wrong and I should say it like 'berry' - so I probably lost my last more Yorkshire pronunciation then! An RP accent was definitely still associated with prestige and education then. My accent now is not as posh as when I was little, but it is still a quite neutral, 'dictionary' sort of pronunciation, and not regional. I live abroad now but most of my family and their friends in the UK still speak more or less 'RP', though toned down compared to the old BBC newsreaders. You won't often now hear the sort of accent where, for example, people would have said something like 'het' instead of 'hat' and 'room' would have the same sound as 'foot'. But maybe all accents are tending to move a bit closer -- fewer speak with a really 'broad' Yorkshire accent, and fewer speak with an extreme version of RP.

this is one of your most interesting videos yet

Very interesting and enlightening, thank you!

I had guessed the year would be 1963, so I was close. I grew up in a lower working class council estate in the 60's, a place built for Londoners displaced by the war where they spoke a kind of weird cockney accent, and I well recall the contempt we all had for rich posh gits who dressed like penguins and listened to chamber music (classical music) and we had hours of fun deriding them and their accent.

Great lecture, well argued. Thanks!

I appreciate the attention to detail in how you processed the Patreon members' names. Very nice reproduction of the artefacts of sixties TV.

This video goes well with Simon Roper's Upper Class accents through time (Did the British Once Sound American?). Two fantastic academics on linguistics. Thanks Dr Lindsey!

It's like the William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal upper class accent that seems to live on only in the movies. There was Thurston Howell the Third on Guligan's Island and his wife, Lovey. I think when Gore Vidal and those guys died, the accent died with them. No one could talk like that with a straight face. The same phenomenon happened in the UK and probably donno lots of other countries.

Fascinating video, thanks :)

Fascinating video!

I remember a while ago, an American woman wanted to show how to pronounce a British accent. I think she heard a lot of the posh accent from British comedies, and some people said it was a very Monty Python accent (we got Monty Python in the USA for a very long time). She got lambasted Poor woman. Then again, the Internet wasn't at the stage it is now

Fascinating set of comments to a fascinating video. Alongside the RP pronunciation there was also the "RP" grammar and sentence construction, for instance - " having agreed this, we can move on to..., based on continued struggle to reflect the meaning of Latin past participles, or the avoidance of prepositions at end of sentences, which is still the standard Dutch/Germanic way of constructing sentences. I also notice nowadays the common dropping of the "-ly" ending to convert adjectives into verbs ( whether that is a more recent change I don't know).

Thank you for your video... this is fascinating. It would love to see you analyze the speech patterns of historical recordings before the 1960s.

Your "advanced RP" examples reminded me of Lady Cynthia Fitzmelton from the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy BBC Radio Play (first episode), when she arrived at Arthur's house to dedicate the "most splendid and worthwhile" bypass to be driven through his home. Her speech had the very air of "pompous self-importance" it's meant to convey. Fortunately, she soon thereafter vanished in a puff of hydrogen, ozone, and carbon monoxide.

Another great and informative episode.

Thanks! Interesting and good to know, as always.

Ebsoliutely fescinating - thenk you sew march. Subscribed!

Fascinating. Thanks.

My mother was born in *Bolton* in 1929. Though one wouldn't have thought it, when hearing her speak.. She had her accent educated out of her by rout. And brought me in the same way, from 1965 (ie) "Mum, I'm going tut, shop." err!! "You mean you are going, to *the* shop." But now it's ok to say *"Thas dunt talk propa, like what us does"* . ha ha ha

When I was younger, I traveled to the UK often for work (I'm a New Englander). This was about 30 years ago. RP was very much in evidence in London, where I stayed. I can see now how it has changed. Fascinating stuff. Thanks Dr. Lindsey.

Great video as always! Thank Dr. Lindsey (and please consider continuing the dictionary's edition; it would love seeing the great change of symbols, or the real ones😅)

Fascinating. Very interesting.

I live in Cornwall having moved down from Coventry 15 years ago. The other day I was walking past the local secondary school as they broke up for the day and amongst hundreds of teenagers I heard nothing that I would have called 'Cornish' or even 'West Country' just 10 years ago! If anything I'd describe the prevailing accent as southern middle class with a smattering of London council estate thrown in. No judgement! Just observation!

I first saw Albert Finney in the Dresser. Extraordinary voice; funny scene in it where he stops a train by filling the entire station with his voice. A few years later I read Alec Guinness's (auto?)biography. He said the army medical examiner (when he enlisted) told him his lung capacity was significantly greater than normal and if he had an explanation for it. Guinness told him "I'm a stage actor."

Awesome video, somehow 25 minutes just flows right past and I'm surprised by the (excellent) credits at the end.

You know, Dr Lindsey, that I'm a Costa Rican Spanish speaker. I try hard to understand your phonetic work, but it attracts me very much. Thank you.

Waited from the first part of this video for when you would get to "Upper class twit of the year awards". Was not disappointed. ....and the Peter Cooke / Dudley Moore bit. In the movie Bedazzled, when Dudley is taking orders for Wimpy burgers (before he sells his soul) and then the Devil (Peter) makes him into an urbane sophisticate and then a rich cuckold, the whole movie is pitting working class accents against "posh" to hilarious effect. To an American ear it was all extremely funny. Had no idea there was a linguistics / generational war brewing underneath it all. But then, I remembered listening to people walking out of the first screening of The Holy Grail complaining that they "could not understand a word". My projectionist buddy and I had per-screened it the night before and it was all perfectly understandable to us. But I think we had both been watching The Flying Circus for some time on PBS by that time, so it all just sounded like British English.

How does RP relate to the “posh” Trans Atlantic accent heard in many American movies from the 1940s and 1950s? Katherine Hepburn’s accent comes to mind. I hear a lot of the RP accent in Trans Atlantic.

Congratulations on a great and very informative video. I'm doing a PhD that partly deals with the phonetics and phonology of what used to be RP and now people recognise as Southern British English. I am using Gimson (1970) and Wells (1982) to compare them with more recent sources such as the latest edition of Gimson's Pronunciation of English by Alan Cruttenden which was published in 2014. There is a whole section in that last book dedicated to discuss what should be the name that replaces RP as the term to refer to the Southern British English and the author proposes General British and I was wondering what is your opinion on the matter. Again, I found your video most interesting and I will probably cite it in my thesis!

Very interesting. Thank You.

Interesting that you said that the TRAP and DRESS vowels hadn't lowered in Australian English. They definitely have, for younger speakers anyway. They're not as low as in England, but still much lower than they used to be. I think this change must have happened later than it did in England.

@DrGeoffLindsey This is fascinating, thank you! Now, as a German who was supposed to learn "Queen's English" in the around 1980, I would be very interested in a more dumbed down version on how to interpret IPA the British way as opposed to American which dominates the Internet. I recall your great hints about ship/sheep for the French - so I'm suggesting to contrast British and American English with respect to significant pronounciation features - but then for English as a foreign language: Like German "that" sounding like "dot" in the US, because we struggle to find the "flat" vowel, and the non-posh British do understand German "that" better (but es bunk bulance, thut is). In Holland and France, they also learn "bütler" for butler where I would say butt-ler. We simply don't know how to read the IPA. The problem could be that you would know too many dialects, so I refer only to average neutral News broadcasting in UK vs. US, and all in connection with the IPA symbols that might or might not differ for UK/US. Or else, take some time to advertise more of your older videos, I just may have overlooked the one I'm suggesting here.

I liked the heritage ad. My dad filled 2 3 drawer filing cabinets with the family genealogy going back 73 generations. One family book on the Sterling line published in 1858 goes back 600 years. As to pronunciation and word usage Between US and UK I know a few UK terms and can usually guess context on others.

A very interesting linguistic examination of RP's role in the 1960's and beyond. Thank you, and I enjoyed it. But I think it would be much more informative (especially to your non-British audience) to include samples of the types of speech you are referencing. That would really make this lesson more compelling for today's speakers of English, I think. (p.s. I do understand about copyright and such.... probably very difficult to include examples of speech as a result).

Finally, a phonetic explanation of Gap Yah

I think a lot of English speaking countries had this issue, and it mostly manifested itself in newsreaders. Nobody in New Zealand, for example, talked like Philip Sherry or Judy Bailey in real life, but that halfway-round-Cape-Horn accent was what they gave us.

I can totally understand that before there was one way to learn a foreign language without leaving your country - through a textbook written ages ago. But it astonishes me that now, when this information is available for anybody who has access to the internet, some teachers of English have no idea that RP isn't used as it was before, or never heard about SSB and apply the term RP to English used in London. I study English in uni and my pronunciation would always get 'corrected'. I couldn't understand what the problem was and thought I can't hear the sounds until I saw one of your videos. So, thank you so much!

Het's orf to this raather good televisual explenetion!

I was a child of 11 when the Profumo scandal hit. Looking at the UK now who would have believed he would be so prophetic.

Another video on local readings of English words. Eventually, it appears right to remember them as Latin writing with some changes and remember some their local reading or dialect readings like in Chinese. I like how some Italians misspell English words in Latin manner, it is so much more understandable for foreigners than normal English.

Good survey. Delighted to sign up. I remember in about 1991 telling my then fiancée, who had a book with RP English pronunciation indicated, that very few people actually spoke like that. I also remember my mother in the 1960s insisting that the short endings of "happy" etc were "correct". She changed her own speech considerably in the last forty years of her life. But I'm not intending to change my own speech to conform with current trends by abandoning the word "an" and the glide in "the army".

Dr Lindsey, we thenk you.

Albert Finney is a superb actor who did whatever accent was necessary for the character. More interesting to me is Michael Caine who seems to have stayed loyal to his original speech patterns--and Alfie was another huge English movie of the 1960s.

Superb video Geoff, I very much enjoyed it. I think class and region have very interesting intersecting dynamics. When I was at school in the 60s and 70s in Edinburgh, and later, Cupar, Fife, I would speak with my peers at school more towards the local accent, and posher at home, because my parents had "escaped" the glottal stop of their 1920s poor working class roots. Their accent wasn't RP, but it was "smoothed" out. On the grammar front, I wasn't allowed to say "me and James", rather, it had to be "James and I".

The "might as be called Kevin" line made me laugh so hard I nearly choked. I had to rewind the video to see what had been drowned out by my laughter. Didn't expect to get such a good laugh from a grammer video, sincerely thank you for that :3

I love that Profumo clip.

Superbly researched video presented with panache. I hung on every word!

In a broadly cultural sense, you certainly have a point. However, there have been quite a few widely respected and admired communicators who have carried on the tradition of pronunciation and prosody one associates with RP. Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry come to mind.

Love this

A small correction: Harold Wilson was born and raised in Huddersfield. He was not a Merseysider. I agree completely with your analysis, however. And regarding the Queen - I shall never forget how startled I was to hear Her Majesty, whilst sitting for a portrait by Rolf Harris, offer as a response to a question not "no", but "nah", just as a Londoner would. I kid you not. I had to rewind my VCR several times in order to convince myself that I had heard her correctly. You can verify this yourself by looking up "The Queen by Rolf" on RU-vid and going to 11:09.